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One example could be, give me money and I'll give you a computer that can translate English to Spanish.
Another example could be, Apple share holders profit from iphone sales, and the iphone UI leads naive/normal people to think texting while driving is ok.
Could you please answer:
1) What is your opinion about Actor Model? Does it have a potential? What is the next step for OOP?
2) Do you think software of the future should be end-user modifiable?
3) What would be the Dynabook of 2016? Smart contact lenses with a gesture interface?
Thank you very much!
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Imagine: 1. trying to read something long, or 2. going off to a follow a link and to come back and respond, only to find that the page has been refreshing while you looked away. Now you have to scroll about to find the place you were at in order to respond or to continue reading the comments.
How about a little model of time in a GUI?
You have an interesting reading list at http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp. However it seems that it was created long time back. Are there any other books that you would like to add to this list ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We were mostly thinking of "human advancement" or as Engelbart's group termed it "Human Augmentation" -- this includes education along with lots of other things. I remember noting that if Moore's Law were to go a decade beyond 1995 (Moore's original extrapolation) that things like television and other "legal drugs" would be possible. We already had a very good sense of this before TV things were possible from noting…
Then what do you think about the concept of "gamification?" Do you think high densities of reward and variable schedules of reward can be exploited to productively focus human attention and intelligence on problems? Music itself could be thought of as an analogy here. Since music is sound structured in a way that makes it palatable (i.e. it has a high density of reward) much human attention has been focused on the ph…
At my office a lot of the non-programmers (marketers, finance people, customer support, etc) write a fair bit of SQL. I've often wondered what it is about SQL that allows them to get over their fear of programming, since they would never drop into ruby or a "real" programming language. Things I've considered: * Graphical programming environment (they run the queries from pgadmin, or Postico, or some app like that) *…
Hi Alan, You have an interesting reading list at http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp . However it seems that it was created long time back. Are there any other books that you would like to add to this list ?
Hi Alan, do you still do coding (any kind of, for any purpose) these days? If you do, what's your comfortable setup (say, language, editor, tools and etc)?
Hi, I have a few questions about your STEPS project: - Is there a project that is the continuation of the STEPS project? - What is your opinion of the Elm language? - How do you envision all the good research from the STEPS model could be used for building practical systems? - STEPS focused on personal computing, do you have a vision on how something similar could be done for server-side programming? - Where can I fi…
The VPRI reports, and before that some of the papers on Croquet (especially the idea of "teatime" which might be described as event-driven, log-based, relative time with eventual data/world-consistency) are fascinating, and I'm grateful for them being published. Also the Ometa-stuff[o] is fascinating (if anything, I think it's gotten too little mind-share).
It seems to me, that we've evolved a bit, in the sense that some things that used to be considered programming (display a text string on screen), no longer is (type it into notepad.exe) -- it's considered "using a computer". At the same time some things that were considered somewhat esoteric is becoming mainstream: perhaps most importantly the growing (resurging?) trend that programming really is meta-programming and language creation.
ReactJS is a mainstream programming model, that fuses html, css, javascript and a at least one templating language - and in a similar vein we see a great adoption in "transpiled" languages, such as coffee script, typescript, clojurescript and more. HN runs on top of Ark, which is a lisp that's been bent hard in the direction of http/html. I see this as a bit of an evolution from when the most common DSLs people were writing for themselves were ORMs - mapping some host language to SQL.
In your time with VPRI - did you find other new patterns or principles for meta-programming and (micro) language design that you think could/should be put to use right now?
Other than the web-developers tendency to reinvent m4 at every turn, in order to program html, css and js at a "higher" level, and the before-mentioned ORM-trends -- the only somewhat mainstream system I am aware of that has a good toolkit for building "real" DSLs, is Racket Scheme (Which shows if one contrasts something like Sphinx, which is a fine system, with Racket's scribble[2]).
Do you think we'll continue to see a rise of meta-programming and language design as more and more tools become available, and it becomes more and more natural to do "real" parsing rather than ad-hoc munging of plain text?
[o] https://github.com/alexwarth/ometa-js
[s] https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/getting-started.html
Hi Alan, You have an interesting reading list at http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp . However it seems that it was created long time back. Are there any other books that you would like to add to this list ?
Take a look at the HN discussion on this -- perhaps someone will supply a URL?